They tell you cowboys make good lovers

How the west was really won. This is not a tale about some weather worn man wearing plaid in the prairie wind. How he took his strong warm hands and tied up some thousand pound beast. It's not the tale of the settler's with their rifles and wagon wheels. About how they settled and killed the buffalo. It isn't the painting of a prairie sunset on canvas for the first time. It isn't the Hoover dam.

No, the west was won with some wire. Wire stretched between two posts. Two posts in sucession over millions of miles. Now you may say, "Well the cowboys put that up, put cows on the land." and sure, they put it up. But, the wire did its own work. With barbs evenly set to tear apart equine and bovine flesh alike if they should try to escape, this wire made cowboys and their ability to ride the horse well and guide the wayward cows in obsolete. Barbed wire stretched across the land, tearing into the back of providence with strips of rusty wire wrapped in nails. Criss-crossing along wooden posts for as many miles as the one cowboy had license to own. Then more cowboys moved in, and with them, more cows. They didn't have to be nomads of the open terrain, to ride the open down to the stocks to collect their livelihood. They could grow fat, fat upon the land, and sit comfortably in their homes, hire out the work to the less fortunate who had to brave the beating wind. The cows could grow fat upon the limited annual renewal of the open grassland, carving into it with dinnerplate hooves and seven stomachs. Upon the beast the landowner grew fat and contented, hiring out the annual pilgrimage to the meat markets to the many tan faced wanderers that tacked up their painted ponies with sun cracked leather. Yes, the barbed wire stuck, wrapping itself around the breathing beast of the prairie, made it do its bidding, burdened it with the attempt to feed so many on its limited resources. A whole territory subdivided into what was theirs and what was the rest, for the many recluses of the night to try to sneak in through its steely, biting fingers and take what did not belong. To drag back to their dens and to the cubs, kits, pups, and kittens and feed their hungry, needing maws. To try to complete the natural cycle of life. But the landowners did not like that. They came with their rifles or hired out their own specialized bounty hunters to lay in wait and to annihilate the theives. Theives on a land that was claimed much longer than the human lifespan by the claws, hooves and talons that abided there ages ago. The west was won with a strand of twisted metal that beat the open land into obedience.

The west was won.